Two years into her first superintendency, Detroit Superintendent Deborah McGriff has advanced an ambitious and controversial urban school reform package. The public school choice plan has been expanded, and 21 schools have adopted school-based-management plans despite union opposition. This fall, the district will abolish the general education…

This book delineates the effects of the Great Depression upon the schools and explores how the supporters of public education responded to the retrenchment of school budgets. The introduction postulates that the public schools as a bureaucratic system in the best of times produced what it was capable of producing, which at times coincided with the…